After growing up in Berlin, he was radicalised by the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg and founded the Movement 2 June with his best friend Georg von Rauch.
[3] In 1964, Baumann started to engage with the counterculture and to hang out at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church where dropouts would drink wine and take the stimulant Captagon or the cough medicine Romilar for psychoactive effects.
[2] He was living with Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weissbecker in the Wielandkommune and they decided to become urban guerillas, forming a group called the Zentralrat der umherschweifenden Haschrebellen (Central Council of Roving Hash Rebels).
[2][4] Baumann participated in the riots and attacks against the Springer Media headquarters on the Easter weekend of 1968 after the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke.
[1] Baumann recruited Inge Viett and Verena Becker to the Movement 2 June and together they planted a bomb at the British Yacht Club in Gatow which killed a builder.
[5][1] This death caused Baumann to consider his role in political violence, whilst Becker and Viett moved on to join the Red Army Faction.
[1] Gudrun Ensslin of the Red Army Faction called it a "fascist pamphlet", whilst Daniel Cohn-Bendit contributed an afterword in which he praised it as a "literary masterpiece" and a "revolutionary book".
[1] When the documents of the former East Germany were made accessible by the Stasi Records Agency after the German reunification, Der Spiegel published an account in 1998 of how Baumann had written a 125-page report to the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) about 94 people within the armed struggle movement, including information on assaults, attacks, weapons, and sexual preferences.
While activists around Rainer Langhans soon distanced themselves from the hash rebels and consciously opted for peaceful protest, Bommi Baumann and his friends sought a radical change in circumstances.
Most known members of Hash Rebells were Dieter Kunzelmann, Ralf Reinders, Michael „Bommi“ Baumann, Ronald Fritzsch, Norbert „Knofo“ Kröcher, Bodo Saggel, Bernhard Braun, Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weissbecker.